Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  Behind us in line was a group of five men. I was standing with my old college roommate, Bernie, and we deduced, through careful analysis, that they were Chilean – which is to say that they were wearing Chilean football shirts and had on enormous felt top hats patterned after the Chilean flag.

  They were singing a song.

  ‘Maybe we should get a picture with them,’ murmured Bernie. The Chileans were delighted to pose with us. In the picture one of them is making a peace sign with a cigarette between his fingers, another is gesturing toward the camera (‘Take it already!’), and a third, though I didn’t notice it at the time, is wearing the same sneakers I had back at the apartment.

  That evening we sat on our balcony along the waterfront, drinking the Castles we had bought and discussing the encounter. I don’t remember whether we made a definite decision to take more photos like that, but the next morning we stopped a Brazilian fan for a picture, and an hour later a group of Paraguayans, and soon enough we had a mission: to get a picture with fans from each of the thirty-two nations at the World Cup.

  It’s funny: The principles for which the Cup is lauded, such as international goodwill, global understanding, even peace, are admirable, but their incessant repetition has a deadening effect. In fact I would argue that in general soccer receives credit for a great deal of aspirational nonsense and then, in practice, engenders primarily bitterness. Nearly all the teams lose a lot; the fans hate each other; it encourages various cities to despise each other.

  But once we began to take these pictures, those principles slowly began to feel real. We encountered fans in bars, in parking lots, at games, locked out of their hostels late at night on Long Street, and these aleatory connections started to fulfill – to exceed – the World Cup’s ambitious imaginative responsibilities. In other words, you really do feel more together there. People really are all the same. The world really does feel smaller.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  So who did we meet? Our holy grail was the North Koreans – but more on that momentarily. First, a brief and unscientific taxonomy of the fans we met in Cape Town.

  The Friendliest - The Netherlands.

  They were friendly to the point of possible derangement – other than our one Dutch acquaintance, who always greeted us, mysteriously, with ‘Here come the homosexuals.’ All the Dutch fans had vuvuzelas, those terrible plastic one-note horns that you’ve probably half-forgotten about, but by way of apology the ones we got a picture with handed us orange earplugs.

  The Saddest - Paraguay.

  I would attribute this to the biblical rainfall that arrived just before their opening game against Italy, but on later, sunnier days, they still looked sour. And they won their group! Not to mention having the breakout star of the World Cup (non-player division), lingerie model and fan Larissa Riquelme, who achieved international fame by keeping her cell phone in her bra! Maybe Paraguay is so beautiful that only the depressives leave.

  The Coolest - Brazil.

  But not, to our surprise, with a samba vibe. They were more like Europeans, wearing complicated metallic blue jeans, with hairstyles we would see six months later in the States. We got a photograph with a guy who looked like a fat Robinho.

  The Best Looking - Algeria.

  An attractive people. The lovely and very affable girl with whom we took a picture appears, upon review, to have been holding her middle finger up in the direction of the camera. Hopefully that was unintentional.

  The Most Popular - Uruguay.

  Easily spotted (their pale-blue shirts) and very cheerful. Our photo is with a large family of men from different generations of the same family; my eyes are closed in it. They were karmically rewarded for their attitude by a great run in the tournament.

  The Grumpiest - France.

  They were not pleased with the quality of coffee in South Africa. Or the quality of their team. Or our photography project. They were probably the nationality that most conformed to their international reputation.

  The Worst - England.

  As an avowed Anglophile, I am pained to write this.

  But the English fans booed their team, turned lobster red under anything other than the mildest sunlight, wore Manchester United shirts to high-end functions, sang ‘England 5-Germany 1’ at any perceived provocation, and were always half of whatever fight was going on. Alas.

  The Best - South Africa.

  At every Olympics and World Cup the host nation collects praise for its hospitality, but South Africa was – at least I believe – actually different. Everyone, everyone, black, white, rich, poor, seemed filled with an almost impossible sense of goodwill and joy. Nearly all of them felt it was a chance to redefine their country.

  But did it succeed? Shortly after we arrived in South Africa we went to a Springboks rugby match. During the national anthem we noticed that the people near us sang only half the song. It turned out that the anthem is a hybrid of several Apartheid-era songs, and almost always the black fans sing the parts in Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho, while the white fans take the parts in Afrikaans and English.

  On the other hand I saw both white and black people openly weeping when Mandela appeared for the first time, frail and beaming. ‘While he is alive, no man is an orphan,’ someone said.

  And this: After the rest has fallen away, the one thing I’ll remember about this World Cup is the first goal of the tournament. South Africa was playing Mexico, and in the apartment where we were watching, it was tense. The score was nil-nil, and there was an almost desperate edge to the optimism of the South Africans who were with us – this all had to be worth it, the preparation, the hope. Then someone named Siphiwe Tshabalala struck as pure a ball as you’ll ever see across the goalkeeper – and across all of Cape Town, ongoing for what seemed like twenty minutes, came waves and waves of cathartic and joyous screams.

  The Weirdest - North Korea.

  If you remember the North Korean team’s presence at the 2010 World Cup, it’s most likely either because you remember when they lost 7–0 to Portugal in their second group game – which led to a lot of uneasy jokes about the players and managers being reeducated – or because you heard that Kim Jong-Il was giving the team ‘regular tactical advice during matches’ using invisible mobile phones…of his own design.

  If you’re surprised at this technological breakthrough, you really ought to consider the dictator’s other accomplishments, such as: inventing the hamburger, circa 2004; controlling the weather based on his mood; never defecating; and shooting eleven holes-in-one in a single round of golf – the first round of golf he ever played, in fact.

  These facts are funny; but are they funny? Especially after Kim died, it was common to recite them to friends and laugh. But then, at least for me, some of the actual facts would come to mind and depress me. There was the predictable megalomaniac’s lavishness (waterslides at all his houses, $650,000 a year on Hennessy Cognac) and madness (rounding up short people to exile them to an abandoned island, forcing waitresses at his favorite restaurant to have Westernizing plastic surgery) and above all the famine, the $900 that the average North Korean lives on annually.

  So, yes, the North Korean team got beaten – but maybe it’s better to pause and remember what they achieved. They had no business being at the World Cup. Almost none of their players play in international leagues, they had a coaching staff of limited experience, and they came from this weird magical realist hellscape that Kim Jong-Il created.

  And then when they did make the World Cup, they had the terrible misfortune to be drawn in the group of death, with the teams ranked first, third, and twenty-seventh in the world.

  We went to their game against the third-ranked team – Portugal – full of hopes for a picture with a few grinning North Koreans. Almost immediately we heard the rumors, still unsubstantiated, that in fact the North Korean fans were hired Chinese actors, the DPR government fearing defections.

  For their part the Portuguese fans were in riotous good spirits as they
pooled into the stadium; by contrast the North Koreans walked in small battalions, very nearly in formation, each with an identical red hat, shirt and scarf, like an alien’s interpretation of the erratic and festive outfits you see at the World Cup.

  ‘Go up to them,’ said Bernie.

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘I’ve got the camera.’

  If I were North Korean, no matter how ardent my affection for Kim Jong-Il, I think my eyes would flicker upward if a big American came toward me, making a bear-hug motion and saying ‘Photograph! Photograph!’ in a loud voice. Nope. They flowed around me as unconsciously as water. We tried the next group. Same thing. The next group after that. Same again.

  Then the game. There are two traditions in soccer that match the sport’s outsized reputation for sportsmanship: kicking the ball out of bounds when an opposition player is injured, even if it means sacrificing an advantage, and exchanging jerseys at the end of the game. The North Koreans did neither. And the gulf in class between the two teams was unbearably obvious.

  But there was a kind of stupid heroism to their performance, even in abject defeat. They ran harder than the Portuguese – the absurdly gifted Portuguese, led by Cristiano Ronaldo, who might as well have been a cyborg designed to play the sport – no matter what the score was, their faces impassive, their inward spirits a mystery. What would be the consequences to them? How many of them believed fully in Kim Jong-Il, and if so, how distraught must they have been to fail him?

  It risks condescension to describe what I felt at the end of the game, the mixture of admiration, pity, revulsion, curiosity, gloating, and arrogance, none of it very nice. The North Korean fans near us sang continually and ceaselessly, irrespective of the match’s events. On the way out we attempted, while making sympathetic faces and noises, to get them to pose for a picture. In the end we had to settle for one of them walking around us two grinning monkeys, their eyes forward, their pennants still in the air.

  Actually it’s the photo I look at most often from the whole trip. No traveler wants to hear this – it militates against the almost spiritual amplification we ascribe to travel – but sometimes going out there, away from home, doesn’t make you feel closer to other people, or make the world feel smaller. It makes you feel more estranged from other people, and it makes the world feel bigger. Even at the World Cup.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  In my experience there are three kinds of trips that have a lasting effect on a person.

  First, there’s the trip that confronts you with the natural world, forcing you to see yourself very small, as if from a great distance; second, there’s the trip that comes at a crucial time in your life, after you just got your dream job or someone has left you, and it doesn’t matter where you go, Quebec, Montserrat, whatever; and third, there’s the trip that shows you other human beings who are different from you, how they live, what they do. That third kind of trip was the World Cup for me. It sounds stupid, but even if I never go to Uruguay, I kind of went to Uruguay, for ten minutes or however long we chatted with the Uruguayans we met.

  On one of our last nights in Cape Town we sat in silence on our balcony, gazing out at a ship until at last it dipped below the horizon, birds looping loosely against the pink of sunfall. (Maybe it was that first kind of trip, too, now that I think about it.) There were four of us, a doctor, a sportswriter, a mystery novelist, and a businessman.

  ‘Rio in 2014?’ someone said at last.

  For sure, we all agreed.

  But who knows. I turned thirty in Cape Town, and I had just realized that I would probably get married very soon. By 2014 I would be thirty-four, and though I know that if you look for endings everywhere you’ll find them, I had a sense, on the balcony, that a window was closing, that the future was uncertain. I’ve found that life is less recursive than I imagined it would be when I was younger, and the same faces seemed to pop up every month or two; now I know that I might never get to Rio, or even back to South Africa.

  Maybe it was all three kinds of trips.

  In the end we got pictures with fans of twenty of the thirty-two nations that were represented at the World Cup. There was Ghana (delighted with his team’s run in the Cup), Mexico (a family in Heathrow wearing enormous sombreros), Cameroon (we spotted him because he always held his scarf above his head), Italy (genuinely distressed at their team’s performances, or perhaps just uniformly sullen). Unfortunately we never got Nigeria, Denmark, or Japan, among others. It’s a shame because I heard later that the Nigerian fans were the best. I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.

  The Thieves of Rome

  BY M. J. HYLAND

  M. J. Hyland is the author of three multiaward-winning novels. How the Light Gets In was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Carry Me Down was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was winner of both the Hawthornden and Encore prizes; and This is How was longlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Dublin International IMPAC Prize in 2009. Hyland’s short story ‘Rag Love’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2011. Hyland is also a lecturer in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and cofounder of the Hyland & Byrne Editing Firm: www.editingfirm.com and www.mjhyland.com.

  From August 2006, until June 2007, I lived, alone, in Rome. In August, most Romans move their olive bodies closer to the cooler sea and leave the city. They leave behind boiling days and packs of Roman and Roma thieves. The Roma are Romanian, not Italian, and many live in migrant camps, their tents and mattresses spread out on the roadside, along the dry, concrete outskirts. There are thousands of Roma pickpockets, many of them children under fourteen – too young to prosecute – and some get trained in Naples. The Roma children make the lion’s share of their living working on the 64 and 40 buses, which run tourists straight to the Vatican.

  I lived in the B.R. Whiting Studio in Trastevere as an Australia Council for the Arts Writing Fellow. My first Italian friend (I’ll call him ‘Stefano’, not his real name) was a member of Italy’s elite police force, the Carabinieri, the national gendarmerie of Italy. I asked my English friends, who lived in Rome, to recommend an Italian language tutor, and one of them, an artist, referred me to Stefano, a young friend of his, who’d recently told him he wanted to improve his English.

  Stefano was twenty-eight and had high hopes for himself; he thought maybe – in about fifteen years – he’d achieve the highest rank in the Carabinieri, become a Comandante Generale. He came to the studio to meet me in late August. When I opened the front door, he said, ‘I think you are the daughter,’ and what he meant was, ‘I want to have sex with you.’

  We sat at the kitchen table and started our English and Italian lessons. Over the next six months, we met once or twice a week. He used gifts, and lobster dinners, to try to seduce me, took me to restaurants where he seemed never to be asked to pay the bill, and volunteered to become my ‘protector’. I learnt the word ‘padrone’ (boss) and that’s what I called him, and I called myself ‘bradipo’ (sloth) because I was so floored by the heat that I went to bed most afternoons, to sleep through the hottest parts of the day. Stefano and I met after dark.

  Sometimes Stefano would take me out on his cop motorbike. One night we got off the bike near the Trevi Fountain. Stefano saw a Roma boy moving between the legs of American tourists.

  ‘A thief,’ Stefano said, and he told me about the ways of the Roma thieves.

  He told me about their tricks and techniques: the ‘drop’ baby, street bumping, razor blades for slicing handbags, the scooter steal, the squirted mess of mayonnaise on the victim’s back, the fake ‘tourist’ police officer who asks to check I.D., and the little girl selling roses.

  ‘I know all those,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t know all. Listen all of this!’

  He told me about the lost and returned wallet trick. In this routine, after the thief has snatched your wallet – using the bumping method �
�� he returns it, seconds later, pretending he’s an honest man who happens to have found it. If the ‘victim’ is happy enough, they pay a reward.

  ‘That’s pretty good,’ I said.

  ‘It is no the best. Listen this.’

  He told me about the routine used by Roma thieves on train platforms, a con used mainly in summer because the trick requires an open window: You are alone in a first-class train compartment. The train is on the platform, due to leave in a few minutes. An Italian man taps on the window of your carriage and you stand at the window. He’s frantic and needs directions, but you say, ‘I don’t speak Italian. I am English.’ He goes away. You sit back down in your cushy seat. A moment later, a good-looking, well-dressed man taps on the window. He speaks beautiful English and needs help, something about airport trains, where to buy tickets. You stand at the compartment’s open window and answer his questions and forget to pay attention to the bag and the suitcase on the floor behind you. The first man, the one you couldn’t help, is on the train now, and he’s helping himself to your things.

  ‘They also ride mopeds on the footpath and grab women’s handbags,’ I said.

  ‘No. That is Italian thieves,’ said Stefano. ‘I show you a Roma technique. Aspetti.’

  Stefano went to a nearby tabacchi and returned with a newspaper.

  ‘You must walk back and then you walk forward me, you come me, and I show you.’

  I put my satchel down. ‘OK.’

  ‘No. You keep your bag in your person.’

  ‘You should say “on your person,”’ I said, ‘or you say just “keep it with you”. Or just “hold your bag”. Capito?’

  ‘Va bene.’

  I walked back about ten paces and then forward. Stefano walked towards me holding the newspaper. When I was near him, he held the newspaper under my chin, just held it there, no aggression, a strange, non-violent, unnerving interference, and as he did this, he looked at me and said nothing.